REASON ONE
Rabbis get great seats. Or at least my brother does: for the last ten years or so, my older brother Steve has had a pulpit job at a large suburban temple in the Baltimore area. Many members of the congregation have a latent Jewish urge to impress their rabbi, to treat Steve well, and they’re only too happy to throw a few baseball tickets my brother’s way now and then. When I went to Baltimore last week to check out a Mets-Orioles game, I sat with my brother and his family right behind the visitors’ dugout—like, 50 feet or so from home plate. I had never had such good seats at a sporting event of any kind.

REASON TWO
Rabbis’ children tend to be very well behaved, although if you’re their uncle maybe less so. I sat next to my nephew Josh at the game. I told him, “Josh, these are amazing seats.” Josh said, “We always sit here. Except one time we sat way up there.” He pointed to the merely excellent seats over by the right field foul pole. Then my niece Tali laughed when I spilled overpriced ballpark lemonade on my jeans, but it wasn’t mean-spirited.

REASON THREE
Rabbis supply their guests with booze. In this case, microbrews from one of the pricier concession stands at Oriole Park. Much more enjoyable than a souvenir cup full of watery Bud Light (although there’s something to be said for souvenir cups).

REASON FOUR
Philip Roth was a terror the one time I met him. (This is, as I think you will eventually see, related to attending ballgames with rabbis.) When I was a junior in college, I was invited to a luncheon in honor of Roth, who was on campus because he’d just received the Poses Medal for Fiction. (I’ve never heard of the Poses Medal for Fiction since.) Before I went to the luncheon, the novelist Stephen Macauley, who was teaching the fiction workshop I was enrolled in that semester, called me up and left a message that went something like this: “I have a tip for you: don’t try to talk to Roth about literature. Try something like baseball. Roth is a huge baseball fan.” A thoughtful, sweet message, but in retrospect I have to wonder: Did my teacher think I was a socially awkward blowhard who only knew how to talk about books? (He may have had some reason to think this.) I was nervous about meeting Philip Roth. I was. I had read The Counterlife and all the Zuckerman novels. I wanted to be a writer and Roth was Olympian, a hero—I mean, The Counterlife. Plus those two or three stories in Goodbye, Columbus that were, as far as I could see, perfect. I showed up to the luncheon wearing a tie. The only other person wearing a necktie was Roth himself. We were seated at a long table at the faculty club with about a dozen other people—mostly graduate students and English professors. Then, as we sat there eating our salads, Roth began to rip into a seemingly unending list of writers I admired. Someone asked him about Grace Paley. “Grace is a sweet gal,” Roth said, “but a minor writer.” Milan Kundera? “Milan is a friend, but The Unbearable Lightness of Being is French-influenced crap.” On and on it went. My heart sank. I would never be able to touch any of the writers who were being crushed by the weight of the great man’s disdain. One of my only attempts to speak was wasted on a weak-voiced suggestion that Don DeLillo was a worthy novelist who in some ways was extending the fictional project Saul Bellow had begun. “I’ve never read DeLillo,” Roth shrugged. It would have been much better if I’d brought up baseball, the possibility of one day attending a ballgame with a rabbi. At the time, my brother was in his third year of rabbinical school. Maybe Roth would’ve liked hearing about that. Maybe it would have made him feel that he wasn’t sitting there with a spotlight trained on his face.

REASON FIVE
Rabbis have something to teach us about participating in the moment. They are intimately familiar with one of our oldest, most lasting books, so, to the average rabbi, the prospect of a luncheon where people cut down contemporary writers for not being “major” enough sounds preposterous. Better to sit and take in the diamond, watch the game unfold. And from such great seats.

© www.ManuelloPaganelli.com

Pau Gasol reminds me of Big Bird. Maybe if the Lakers didn’t have bright yellow in their uniforms I wouldn’t make this connection, but with the yellow, the Sesame Street association is unavoidable. Gasol is gangly, tall, with feathery hair and a mighty beak. Also, there’s something delicate and birdlike about Gasol’s game—he can throw an elbow, sure, but from what I’ve seen he doesn’t play like most other NBA big men. He’s quicker, more nervous, and I imagine he learned how to flop from European soccer stars, not other basketball players. Gasol, a 7-footer born in Spain in 1980, has won championships and awards in Europe (FIBA Player of the Year, 2008). He’s made the Lakers relevant again, helping to guide them (with the assistance of Kobe Bryant) into the NBA finals for the second straight year.

So why can’t I root for Pau Gasol? I like Big Bird. And I used to love watching the Lakers when Magic Johnson was in his prime; the very uniform Gasol wears, in its yellow and purple glory, should inspire some trust in me.

But I’m not feeling it.

Part of the problem is Gasol’s super-deluxe All Star teammate Kobe Bryant. It is way more fun to root against Kobe than to root for him. This was true even before Kobe was charged with felony sexual assault in 2003. The charge was dropped, but Kobe Bryant never explained himself entirely satisfactorily (he once said of his 19-year-old accuser, “Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did”).

Easy as it is to root against Kobe, though, I think my real problem is with the very notion of professional basketball. These days I much prefer NCAA basketball, March Madness especially. In college basketball, all the games matter, at least to the players. Most of them will never make it to the pros—they can sense their own sports mortality. NBA players, on the other hand, are more like Greek gods, gifted with extraordinary powers but only able to focus when a particular prize catches their eye. Mid-season NBA match-ups are often plain boring, while the much shorter college season is more meaningful precisely because of its limited time-frame. The NBA finals provide a natural corrective to the too-long pro post-season—finally, we’re on the verge of declaring a winner. But by this point in the season I’ve already lost interest.

Lost interest in the NBA, I mean, not in basketball itself.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped to watch part of a tournament game at the West Fourth Street basketball court in Greenwich Village. This court is called the Cage, because it’s hemmed in by high metal fencing. The court is smaller than regulation, so the players have to work in very tight spaces. A guy with a megaphone sits at a table next to the court, making announcements and observations about the action of the game, and all around the outside of the fence passersby stand and watch—close enough to the players so that you can see them seeing you during pauses and free throws. In the game I saw, both teams had quick, skillful players. When there was a foul you could hear the slap of it, and when there was a basket it never felt inevitable, there was always a tinge of grace and luck involved in the ball’s path down through the rim. Watching basketball on TV, or from far up in the arena, takes away some of the evidence of effort. In the Cage, every effort is apparent—the ball is both chalice and albatross.

I know it’s easy to overstate the romance of streetball, the gritty urban allure of the asphalt court. But part of the appeal of that setting is that it provides basketball without All Star distractions—no four million dollar purple diamonds, that’s for sure. Apparently the summer tournament at the Fourth Street Cage was founded by Kenny Graham, a former limousine driver who loved hoops and wanted to make a safe haven for the game in the middle of the city. Over the years future pros like Dr. J, Mario Elie and Anthony Mason have honed their skills in the Cage on their way to NBA glory. Watching competitive streetball at a place like the Cage brings you in contact with the elemental difficulty of playing a sport well. In our era of highlight reels and snarky Sports Center witticisms, that’s an easy thing to forget.

Did you hear about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball habit? Even if you don’t care much for the Beats, it’s still pretty amazing to read about how Kerouac invented his own fantasy baseball league, illustrated his own made-up rosters, and actually played imaginary baseball games with himself well into adulthood …more

I turned on the Mets game yesterday—Mother’s Day—and for a moment, when the picture came in, I thought something was wrong with my TV. The umpire, I noticed, was wearing a pink terrycloth armband. …more

This past week, I should have been haunting Brooklyn’s British ex-pat soccer bars, nestling myself into a corner with an afternoon pint or two, watching as the Champions League semi-finals began. I should have devoted myself to top-flight, high-stakes international soccer, but I didn’t. I didn’t go to Floyd on Atlantic Avenue, nor did I take the L train to the sweet Williamsburg bar kind of near the Eighth Street stop, the bar normally full of, I think, Liverpool fans. The loud crescendos of British men shouting their teams’ fight songs wasn’t what kept me away—I love those stupid songs, wish I had one of my own to sing. Work wasn’t really the problem, either. Wednesday, certainly, I could have found a way to ditch my office hours and get over to Slainte, the Irish soccer bar on Bowery where I once saw a pair of Turkish young women screaming in unrestrained glee when their national team scored a jaw-dropping goal against the Czech Republic. But no, this week I went about my business as though the Champions League games weren’t being played, as though these bars weren’t full of alcohol-fueled fanaticism.

Why have I been avoiding the full blossoming of my own fanatical potential? I always tell myself it’s because I don’t have the time. I’m afraid of Champions League immersion—I don’t need another unmitigated sports-related obsession on my hands. Baseball and football ought to be enough. And don’t I waste sufficient energy every spring weeping over my beautiful, ruined NCAA basketball bracket?

The pleasures of watching great soccer are indisputable. That’s why I’m so jealous of my friend Austin, editor of the Modern Spectator and an online soccer columnist for ESPN the Magazine—he’s been watching this year’s Champions League action because, well, he has to. It’s his job. So on Wednesday afternoon Austin got to see the spectacular goal-keeping display of Arsenal’s Manuel Almunia, while I waited to read about the game in the paper the next day, wishing I knew what the name “Almunia” sounded like as it tumbled from the lips of the commentators calling the game.

One of the pleasures of watching top-notch soccer is the inevitably diverse jumble of names from all over the globe that are woven together in the verbal tapestry of the game-call. It’s music to me and has been for a long time. As a young kid, I often heard my older brother and his soccer-obsessed friends trumpeting the names of foreign footballers who’d come to the States to play in the then-glamorous NASL, the professional soccer league that lured the likes of Pele and Franz Beckenbauer to America in the 70s. The NASL fizzled in the 1980s after too-rapid expansion, but in my child’s mind the league and its mélange of aging European and South American greats was as fascinating as good science fiction. In fact when I think back, I kind of associate NASL stars with the heroes in the original Battlestar Galactica series. I’m sure that, as a boy, I had nightmares in which Johann Cruyff and Giorgio Chinaglia were trying to save me from the Cylons. Perhaps that’s why I felt a mix of awe and terror when I found the website of this NASL uniform collector. The images of these old jerseys gives me the Borgesian sensation of glimpsing a vanished land whose history will never be written.

That may be the real reason I don’t allow myself to dive into the Champions League soccer matches as much as I’d like to. I’m always looking for the symphony of players’ names to include a few Americans, a couple swashbuckling cowboys with more heart than skill, but that’s not the way it works when Arsenal plays Manchester United, or when Barcelona plays Chelsea. (For some reason I’m not willing to count the names of American goal-keepers like Tim Howard—the thought of an American goalie being pelted by the international crème-de-la-crème seems so, I don’t know, representative of North America’s submissive position in the global soccer hierarchy.) Heart and skill are prerequisites at the Champions League level of play. Indefatigable but lead-footed cowboys need not apply.

I don’t follow the current American soccer league, MLS, although I have written about it before. But I do love the story that’s coming out of Seattle right now. Freddie Ljungberg, the talented, tenacious Swedish midfielder who has played in the British Premier League and has also been a Calvin Klein underwear model (surprise, ladies!), has become an American soccer sensation by moving to the Pacific Northwest and playing for the Sounders FC. I haven’t seen the team play, but I feel a strange urge to go online and order a shiny new Sounders jersey with the Viking moniker “Ljungberg” splashed across the back. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll have my own website full of weird American soccer memorabilia. What would the title of that Borges story be, I wonder?

Baseball is back, and New York City, that modest little sports market, has just unveiled two new major league stadiums. This season, the Yankees will play at the shiny limestone rebirth of Yankee Stadium; the Mets will try their luck at Citi Field (also known as Bailout Park, ha ha). A recent New Yorker cover illustration by Bruce McCall summed up the city’s feelings on the matter: McCall pictured the two ball parks bursting out of an orangey cityscape, and then if you looked closer you noticed that each stadium was emerging from its own cardboard box, spilling giant Styrofoam packing peanuts down onto the skyline. In other words, New Yorkers have received a package. They may not have asked for it, but it feels like a gift. That’s the fun part. Turns out, though, that the package’s contents are heavy, extravagant, messy, and a bit wasteful.

I know that, given my status as a sports blogger, I should probably be writing this post while sitting at one of the new stadiums, looking out onto the beautiful symmetry of the sandy infield, watching the distant, graceful figures of grown men playing a boy’s game. But neither the Yankees nor the Mets have hosted their home opener yet. Instead, I’m sitting at home in Brooklyn; I’ve learned most of what I know about the new ball yards from architecture reviews. For example, the New York Times piece on the recently completed stadiums tries to strike a populist chord, suggesting that, while both venues are awash in nostalgia, and while that’s disappointing from an architectural standpoint, it’s probably good from a fan-enjoyment standpoint. NPR’s sports commentator Frank Deford managed to feel offended by this review and delivered a huffy response, which begins with a critique of contemporary stadium-building practices and somehow ends as an essay in praise of nostalgia. (Deford’s piece annoyed me when I heard it on the radio, then charmed me when I read it on the NPR website; not sure what that means about my own critical mood-swings, or about Deford’s reading voice.) The Daily News also paid attention to the formal aspects of the new stadiums in its sports pages, but with a blessedly practical eye. For them, the pertinent questions were not about beauty but about whether Citi Field would be a good hitter’s ball park.

The most upsetting review for me—a childhood Yankees fan who converted to Mets-ianity after moving to New York City in 2000—was Paul Goldberger’s review in the New Yorker. Goldberger is a fine descriptive writer; he informs us that the Yankees’ new home has “a façade of limestone, granite, and cast stone, with high, narrow arched openings and entry portals that seem designed for the ceremonial arrival of the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, or at least George Steinbrenner.” Encouragingly, Goldberger asserts a little later that the Mets’ Citi Field is “pleasanter in every way than the harsh stadium it replaces” (although it’s also smaller than Shea by fifteen thousand seats, which surprised me). The troubling thing about Goldberger’s review, if you’re an arts-conscious Mets fan (and there are a lot of us out there, am I right, arts-conscious Mets fans?), is what he writes at the end. “A stadium is a stage set as sure as anything on Broadway, and it determines the tone of the dramas within,” Goldberger high-steps. “Citi Field suggests a team that wants to be liked, even to the point of claiming some history that isn’t its own.” According to Goldberger, then, the Mets are thieving magpies who lack confidence and natural charisma.

If an architecture review can curse a baseball team, this one probably will. I want to argue here, though, that Goldberger is dead wrong. I’m at a serious disadvantage in this debate for many reasons: Goldberger has been to both stadiums, while I have been to neither one; Goldberger is a longtime student of architecture, while I lived in San Francisco for two years without knowing what “Victorian” meant outside of a literary context; Goldberger is a staff writer at the New Yorker, while I am an unpaid blogger dude. Nevertheless I soldier on in the hopes of shielding the Mets from a damaging karmic payload that their badly shaken collective psyche can ill afford to confront.

In Donald Barthelme’s story “The Balloon,” the narrator describes the inflation of a gargantuan balloon in the sky above Manhattan. The balloon covers 45 blocks and sinks into the gaps between the city’s high-rises. Although the story’s narrator is flat-voiced, there’s a sense of crowdedness, of claustrophobic dread, that springs from the image of the balloon. The story captures a certain urban anxiety that I think is related to new baseball stadiums in general and New York’s pair of gleaming new ball yards in particular—we have added something to our city, something unavoidably big, an edifice (or pair of edifices) that will capture history. And this pushes against Goldberger’s notion of baseball stadiums being like Broadway stage sets—they’re not. They’re larger, more lasting, and their shapes don’t shift.

Louis Menand wrote a great piece about the new Donald Barthelme biography in the New Yorker one month before Goldberger published his damning review of Citi Field in the same magazine. (You can listen to Menand talking about Barthelme’s fiction here, although the full text of his article isn’t available online.) One of the pleasures of the piece is Menand’s working out of the multiple meanings of postmodernism. “Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts,” Menand informs us. It can either be a signal of modernist art’s triumph or its downfall; it can either be used as “ a means of making literature” or a way of subverting and questioning art and art-making. Menand tells us, via his careful reading of the new Barthelme biography by Tracy Daugherty, that Barthelme believed in postmodernism as an art-making tool.

I would like to propose that the New York Mets believe the same thing: they have put their faith in the seriousness of postmodern pleasures. The Mets have borrowed bits of baseball history and assembled the pieces into a postmodern pastiche of a stadium. The new Yankee stadium is clearly a modernist enterprise, burnishing and updating epics of the past, evoking its formal gravitas with an imposing historical and architectural unity. Nothing wrong with that. But in favoring Yankee Stadium over Citi Field, in blessing the Yankees and cursing the Mets, Goldberger is really revealing a prejudice against the possibilities of postmodernism.

In an effort to evoke postmodernism’s habitual appropriation of pop culture artifacts, I will now end with the lyrics of the jingle played whenever WFAN radio goes to a commercial break during a ballgame broadcast:

Let’s Go Mets!

My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick ice. The team’s logo back then—a cartoon caveman holding a hockey stick—appealed to me as a kid, and I was therefore disappointed when the team ditched their identity and became the Binghamton Whalers. I liked the cool graphic of their new logo, though—they turned the blubbery green “W” from the NHL’s Hartford Whalers on its side, so it became a “B” shape with a whale tail on the left-hand edge of the letter

When I was in high school, the Binghamton Whalers hired a new coach, and the coach’s son wound up in my French class. (He was Canadian, so French class was not a problem for him.) Supposedly the kid was a tremendous hockey player; he certainly looked the part, broad-shouldered and lean, with a leonine gaze—he always seemed to be waiting for a rewarding opportunity to sprint after something weaker and slower. But I wound up feeling sorry for him. He never really fit in or befriended anyone. I’m sure the girls were curious, but the only romantic inclination the young hockey prodigy ever expressed was a desire to eat a meal off our 50-year-old French teacher’s bosom. I imagine that, at home, his father told him that our little town was just a stop on the way to something bigger and better—a more lucrative coaching job, a sweet hockey scholarship, years of glory as a bruising winger. Whatever. My old classmate might be in the NHL now for all I know, or his career may be over; maybe he never made it.

After I graduated from high school, the hockey team changed its name again, to the Binghamton Rangers (official team motto: “We’re In a Winning Mood!”). I went to a Rangers game once when I was home from college and recognized the overweight guy steering the Zamboni, that boxy vehicle that re-polishes the ice between periods until there’s a bright liquid sheen over the scarred surface of the rink. The driver had been a merciless bully in seventh grade, someone I’d genuinely feared. I thought, Good, you bastard, you got what you deserved. Driving the Zamboni at hockey games, having that as your job, that’s like a Jean-Paul Sartre play.

Later the Rangers became the Icemen (motto unknown, but note that, despite the fact that I’m writing a literary sports blog, I am resisting any Eugene O’Neill references). These days the hockey team is called the Binghamton Senators, and their mascot is truly evil-looking, some sadistic Roman centurion on skates. How far we’ve come from the gentle, seemingly stoned caveman tooling around with his anachronistic hockey stick.

Ultimately I think the identity flux that my hometown hockey team has suffered says a lot about the place itself. The area of upstate New York where I’m from has been depressed for years; all that hockey-team re-branding is a natural response, an urge to improve or escape, to make it new when it’s really just the same old place. One bright spot in Binghamton has been the university, one of the top SUNY campuses in the state, but even that has an odd history of tangled marketing: first it was Harper College, then SUNY Binghamton, and now we’re all supposed to call it Binghamton University (or B.U., if you prefer). When I was a kid, the university was a Division III school with no accomplished sports teams to speak of; they’ve now moved up to Division I. The basketball team name used to be the Colonials; since then, they’ve been renamed the Bearcats. If, like me, you’ve been absorbed by the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament lately, you may have seen Binghamton matched up against mighty Duke in the first round. The Bearcats (seriously? the Bearcats?) got rocked 86-62, but my hometown paper (this is the newspaper my dad used to read at the kitchen table) turned the bottom line into a story of plucky heroism. The front page featured a huge color photo of a Binghamton player fighting for the ball, accidentally smacking a Duke player upside the head. Take that!

But Binghamton won’t be this year’s Cinderella story, dancing its way deep into March Madness. Too bad: my hometown could have used a boost. In general, the underdog story—and the great thing about college basketball this time of year is that it inevitably generates great underdog stories—is partly about a renewal of hope in a place that has been pinched by hopelessness. That’s why the heroes in sports movies always seem to come from down-and-out towns. And that’s why I didn’t love John McPhee’s recent New Yorker piece about lacrosse. Although McPhee, that elder statesman of American non-fiction, does a wonderful job breathing life into his research (he even reveals that Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous grandnephew played lacrosse for Princeton in 1888), he sort of dismisses one of the great underdog stories in American sports. He notes that the Iroquois, who invented lacrosse, still field competitive teams in international tournaments despite being “populationally outnumbered.” Then he goes on for pages about the Princeton University lacrosse team. Passing over the Iroquois story to cheer on Princeton! No sensitivity to the allure of the underdog.

One reason I’m fascinated by the changing of the Binghamton hockey team names: it’s a flat-out refusal on the part of my hometown to admit they’re the underdog. Dusters? Hell, no—we’re the Senators! We’re the Bearcats! But there’s dignity in the underdog that comes from acknowledging all that you’re up against. And you, Binghamton, are up against it. Anyway, what the hell is a bearcat?

**

More from The Rumpus literary sports blog

“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994 short story “Batting Against Castro,” in which a few feckless members of the 1950-51 Philadelphia Phillies make their way to Cuba in an attempt to revive their baseball careers. The young ball players sign on with a Cuban club called the Cienfuegos, and in the course of the story, despite the narrator’s political disavowal, the Americans find that they can’t quite escape Cuba’s revolutionary fervor. Fidel Castro, just on the cusp of power, starts showing up at their team’s games, always rooting for the other side, even pelting one of the American sluggers with a burrito. He doesn’t like the idea of capitalist pigs playing in the Cuban league.

I’m not about to give away the ending, but Shepard’s story is a classic of the American-guys-trying-to-make-it-in-foreign-sports-leagues genre, or at least it would be if there were such a genre. And I’ve been thinking of this story a lot lately because of this month’s World Baseball Classic, a16-team tournament that organizes the best players in the world by nationality and acknowledges hardball’s global reach. Three years ago, the American squad was ousted from the competition after the first round; Cuba played Japan in the final; I think Japan won. The best part about the first World Baseball Classic, from my perspective, was seeing passengers on the New York City subway wearing their beautiful new Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic jerseys, embodying that complex drama of tribal loyalty that energizes the best American cities. But in the media run-up to this year’s tournament, what has struck me is how the American players stick to a script Jim Shepard himself might have written—it’s not about politics or international tensions, they insist, and nobody seems aware of the fact that there might be some extra relish in the act of defeating Team USA, a.k.a. Goliath. It’s just young guys learning from veterans, playing the game that is their American birthright.

Of course no book captures the problematic myth of baseball’s American-ness the way Bernard Malamud’s The Natural does. I recently found Kevin Baker’s elegant, insightful introduction to Malamud’s novel online, and it gave me a new understanding of the story’s dark probing of “America’s” game. Baker writes that “the ballpark is a swath of idealized nature, plunked down in the middle of an urban block and meant to reform us, morally and physically.” Malamud forces us to see the city grime just a few steps away from the stadium, dramatizing the greed, self-interest and sense of American entitlement that surrounds the sport. The Natural is no nostalgic tale aimed at children; Malamud’s achievement is grown-up and, as Baker notes, almost alarmingly free of easy sentiment.

Getting back to Cuba, though: What does Fidel Castro think about the upcoming World Baseball Classic? Well, take it from the state-approved Chinese press: he’s feeling pretty cocky, especially for a guy whose fundamental alive-ness I was a bit uncertain about. (I had to Google him real quick to make sure he was still alive.) I can’t quite fathom why this Chinese article about Castro’s baseball pronouncements exists, but here it is. It makes me think, again, of the Shepard short story, especially the moment when Castro strides onto the field and takes the mound, convinced that his righteous curveball can make short work of the damn Yankees.

So, unlikely as it may seem, the World Baseball Classic reminds me of why I love to read fiction. A good story lets me witness the improbable interconnections of personal history and world events. It spins confections out of imagined idioms, fesses up to the wisdom of the street, the dugout, the locker room. I don’t want fake baseball memoirs. I don’t want dictionaries full of baseball terminology. Actually, come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind having a dictionary full of baseball terminology. But what I really want is a storyteller to put an arm over my shoulder and tell me something that’s truer than true.

Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in its conception—another homespun story about an athlete whose lack of flashy stats belies his ability to help his team win—Lewis writes with enviable acuity. His profile of Battier is a memorable portrait of the athlete as a young man. And I’d argue that Lewis, a writer who can concisely capture character, setting and mood, and order it all into a tale of suspense without sacrificing reportorial integrity, should be celebrated as a contemporary master. But no one in literary circles talks about Lewis, because his subjects have such wide popular appeal. Yes, I know that Lewis’s book Moneyball sold like eight gazillion copies. I know your step-father has three of them on his bookshelf, two of which were given to him by well-meaning work colleagues. But the book is kind of great, a crisply written narrative braided with real insight about human psychology, sports and good old American money-grubbing.

Lewis’s sensitive depiction of Battier was especially welcome after a week of stale steroids-in-baseball stories. A-Rod, rightly re-dubbed “A-Hole” by a NY Post headline, was everywhere. Rodriguez admitted to ESPN that, in his mid-20s, he ’roided up while playing for the Texas Rangers. So we had to spend days watching every news program known to man cue up the 2007 footage of A-Rod staring indignantly into Katie Couric’s eyes, denying all allegations of steroid use. If there was any pleasure to be had from this palaver, it came from Timothy Egan’s fine Times online blog juxtaposing A-Rod and Michael Phelps. Egan notes that Rodriguez trotted out the I was young and stupid defense, even though he was in his mid-20s and making more money than just about anyone else in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile Phelps, the Olympian man-child “robo-athlete,” had the good sense to express remorse about his gold medal bong hit . The closest A-Rod got to remorse was a few lame, angry-sounding jokes at a University of Miami ceremony celebrating a new sports facility that Rodriguez himself paid for.

Fortunately, there was one redeemingly weird story about doping last week. Cyclist Lance Armstrong lost his cool at a press conference for the Amgen Tour of California. “You’re not worth the chair you’re sitting on with a statement like that,” Armstrong said at one point to Paul Kimmage, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London. It turns out that in September 2008, Kimmage said in a radio interview that Armstrong’s return to cycling would be a “cancer” on the sport, because he suspected that Lance was using drugs to regain his form. Armstrong, a cancer survivor, understandably took exception to the remark. Still, it is unusual to witness a star athlete glowering at a member of the press, and then actually letting loose with real (if restrained) emotion. Especially after the way Rodriguez and Phelps carefully choreographed responses to their respective scandals, Armstrong’s anger felt like an antidote. And it’s a reminder of the contentious ethics involved in professional sports, which Steven Shapin wrote about memorably in the New Yorker a few years ago.

But this brief outbreak of emotion from Armstrong doesn’t come close to the excitement and edification that Michael Lewis is able to generate in his sports writing. Consider this, from the aforementioned article on Shane Battier: “Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt?”

Here, in clear, rhythmic prose, Lewis moves from Battier’s biography to a larger cultural context that takes in race, class, sports and American manhood. These three sentences, like the article as a whole, contain equal parts wisdom and momentum. What do sports tell us about the way our culture defines character? Lewis reaches for answers to such questions, and in this way shows us that sports writing, at its most worthwhile and illuminating, is literature.

Last night, Super Bowl XLIII was interrupted by a twelve-minute segment devoted exclusively to the work of an important American poet. After taking the stage at halftime in front of thousands of screaming football fans and billions of television viewers, the poet threw his electric guitar in the direction of a stage-hand, then slid crotch-first into a TV camera. Not very poet-like behavior, you might say (although that would depend a lot on your personal notion of poetics), but this gleeful outburst was certainly not surprising given the man behind the lyrics. We don’t call him the Bard; we call him the Boss.

Before you cut me off and tell me the adenoidal Jersey Boy is not a notable American literary figure, allow me to refer to Walker Percy. The LA Times recently posted some fascinating glimpses of a three-way correspondence between Percy, Springsteen and, later, Percy’s widow. It turns out that Percy wrote a letter to Springsteen in the ’80s because he felt drawn to the characters in Springsteen’s songs—men and women searching for salvation in an often unforgiving America divided by precipitous class boundaries—and because he wanted to exchange thoughts on the Catholic religion. Also revealed here is Bruce Springsteen’s longstanding admiration for Flannery O’Connor, which I never would’ve guessed. I should have, though. Can’t you see the Springer writing a ballad from the perspective of the tattooed man in the incandescent story “Parker’s Back”?

Lately life has been both exhilarating and a little embarrassing for the Boss. He was out front for Obama at the end of the presidential campaign, performing and raising money, lending his blue-collar poetic gravitas to the then-candidate. On January 18, at the pre-inauguration concert in DC, Springsteen wore mostly rock-star black, singing alongside Pete Seeger and serenading the nation. (For me, this moment beat Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for most inspiringly Whitmanesque interlude of the inaugural festivities.) Just after that pluralistic pinnacle, though, Springsteen was chastising himself and his handlers for giving Wal Mart an exclusive deal to market and sell a collection of his greatest hits. And now, I’d guess, he’s all over YouTube, where the aforementioned groin-to-camera kiss is probably being replayed over and over and over.

In this era of abrasive uncertainty about the fate of the book, I feel ambivalent referring to the Super Bowl halftime show as a literary event. And of course Springsteen, an unapologetic showman, shelved his more challenging material last night, appealing to the Super Bowl groundlings as he sprinted through abbreviated versions of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Born to Run,” “Workin’ on a Dream” and “Glory Days” (with football lyrics subbed in for the original baseball lines). Still, it’s worth thinking about the place Springsteen occupies in the line of American musical art that extends back through Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie all the way to the early gothic of ballads like “Stagger Lee.” At the Super Bowl, at the inauguration, even in his Golden Globe-winning contribution to the movie “The Wrestler,” Bruce is singing two different songs at once—the song of himself, a charismatic, stadium-shaking rock star, and the song of ourselves, citizens who shuffle through the confetti when the game’s over, returning to our fractured dreams of love and work.